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The term culture is one of the most widely used terms in modern language. Discuss the key debates surrounding different interpretations of the term and the relevance of these debates to analysing the mass media. What was once a celebrated art form, a human expression for ones desires, thoughts and feelings, something that was once held in great esteem by academics, philosophers and other high society types has now been reduced to a trash heap pile of rubbish, a self proclaimed industry for churning out instantly recognizable and easily likeable products. Is this a flawed claim summarised by such luminaries as Matthew Arnold and Theodor Adorno, both of whom despised the notion of the media taking such a heavy hand in influencing what has now become known as mass culture.
Or are they simply stating something that has long been creeping under the surface of this multifaceted conceptual idea? As with every argument there are the two sides. Raymond Williams perhaps contradicts best when he says, Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind, (Williams, Convictions, 1958) Williams explains the ordinary process of human society through the nature of a culture that is always both traditional and creative, that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings (Williams, Convictions, 1958) There are different approaches to understanding the term culture; the theory of Cultural Studies embraces the conventional notions of Marxism, Structuralism, Post-modernism, Feminism and Semiotics. These theories can also help us to understand different societies and their cultures, while at the same time allowing us to criticise the progression and integration of the mass media into these cultures. The basis of the media stems from these expressions of human actions and words. Mass culture is the media enhanced version of contemporary artwork and literary genius, broadcast and received globally by millions of unsuspecting viewers.
The controversial question posed by the advent of this mass globalisation is what defines good and bad culture, and who gets to decide this? Focussing on todays contemporary culture, this essay will discuss the key debates surrounding culture from an ideological standpoint and how these debates have had an influence culture in the media. Since industrialisation, and the subsequent urbanisation that followed, critics have been quick to attack mass culture. The main argument being that art should be providing revolutionary visions of the world, individually created and articulated, radical in its methods, disruptive in its provocation of thoughts. Matthew Arnold defined real culture as the best that has been thought and said in the world, (Arnold, 1960: 6) and that it was the study of perfection, (Arnold, 1960: 42) With the advent of English Manchester Liberalism, class recognition became more important in terms of classifying social order.
Culture began to go through a process of fragmentation; it was no longer universal, with the upper classes celebrating the notion of high art and culture, leaving the working class to pick up the pieces to inadvertently form something now called popular culture. Popular culture has been used to label anything that does not hold a history behind it. In particular, anything that promotes a good life concept. The good life concept refers to an ethical vision of how the world might be. This vision of the world is easily open to debate, with the culture industry now reinforcing the status quo that people should be aiming for whatever is advertised. Critics like Matthew Arnold, John Berger and then Theodor Adorno, a member of the Marxist Frankfurt School for Social Research, must have viewed this sweeping mass media movement with distaste, condemning what they must have seen as a rape of the classical high-art culture.
They talk about the concepts of the good life and high art as an accurate way to understand the modern world, and then only choose to label it good, bad, mass or particular. Adorno says that popular culture ignores conflicts and ethical class struggles within a society. (Adorno, 1990: 281) Marketing a leading sports shoe brand next to a page illustrating the horrors of a war torn country in an everyday magazine is surely a tragic irony found only in todays consumer-driven culture. This ideological approach concerns itself more with the social hierarchy in a political sense. The most notable difference between the Marxian notion of culture and that of a contemporary view is that there is an overt effort by Marxist media analysts politics the view and highlight the necessity for a wider range of human / social forms of culture But Adorno also overlooks the fact that culture is culture in whatever shape or form; whether drawn by Picasso, composed by Mozart, directed by Spielberg, or scored by a Ronaldo. All human expressions contribute to the culture of a society. Elitists such as Adorno and Arnold are going to argue that because it doesnt have a history then it cannot survive as true culture but must be condemned as popular culture.
Pieces of history only allow us a small look into a part of a culture that existed, assumptions and educational guesses fill in the rest of the jigsaw, and therefore are cherished as being classical, when in fact they could just as easily be the leftovers of a trashy novel gone wrong. A good example being the works of Shakespeare, the equivalent of a soap opera writer, plays that were written and performed for an audience to enjoy. His works, after a long period of progression, are now cradled as the supreme of English Literature. Media has played an important part in the discovery and development of culture.
With the media interest growing rapidly and widespread availability of technology in peoples homes, people are more exposed to different societies and cultures. With the media acting as the means of transmission for both information and popular culture, there is almost a sensory overload of this mass culture being broadcast. This integration has an influence on society, be it newspapers, a top-rating comedy show, television news reports or magazines, and society is increasingly influencing what is shown in the media as well. Consumer demand is so strong that we are getting our own personalised information filter; the media is reaching out to the public and affecting society's culture as a result. The media is now part of our culture; it is sometimes used as a replacement for conventional institutions such as schools and churches. The television set, is in effect, part of the domestic family, sometimes even replacing the source of conventional cultural values.
The media now provides us with limitless possibilities to the amount of art and culture that we can be exposed to, by this meshing of a multitude of differing cultures, are we not, in fact, creating a new culture as a result? Matthew Arnold's response is to better educate the people, because only educated people know what is good. (Arnold, 1960: 48) The contradiction shown here being that if all these educated people started appreciating high culture, thereby gradually losing its exclusivity, does it not, surely, become, popular culture? What people need to understand, and keep understanding, is that culture is always going to be a progression of human expressions. There is no simple way to theorise and label these progressions.
People are always going to criticise what they cannot have, or what they cannot understand, but for someone to pass judgement on what they do not see, hear or feel as a result of these expressions then is this just another form of discrimination? Raymond Williams, Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture N. McKenzie (ed. ) Convictions, 1958 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge University Press, London, 1960. Theodor Adorno, Culture Industry Reconsidered, Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (ed. ) J. Alexander & S. Seidman n, Cambridge University Press, London, 1990.
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Research essay sample on Culture And The Mass Media
